The NHS watchdog implicated in a cover-up over a hospital where babies died
through neglect spent £785,000 last year on 11 lobbyists.

The Care Quality Commission admitted earlier this week to putting its own reputation before the truth and said there had been a culture of “incompetence, suppression and oppression”.

However, despite promising a “radical overhaul” of the organisation, the watchdog’s bosses are recruiting a new spin doctor with the task of “expertly managing” its reputation.

According to new parliamentary figures obtained by Charlotte Leslie, a Conservative MP and member of the health select committee, the new recruit will be joining an 11-strong public affairs team.

Three of its members are paid about £63,000 and two are paid around £48,000 each. The total spend on the public affairs team has risen from £593,498 in 2011/12 to £785,606 this year.

Miss Leslie said: “There is one very simple way for the CQC to get a good reputation, that’s to do its job of protecting patients. The CQC should spend less time polishing its reputation and more time highlighting the awful things in hospitals. They need to sort this out.”

The former head of the CQC and two other senior officials were named as being at the heart of a cover-up concerning the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust.

Cynthia Bower, the former chief executive, was present during discussions about deleting evidence of the watchdog’s failure to prevent a scandal at a maternity unit. Jill Finney, her deputy, allegedly gave the order to delete, while Anna Jefferson, the CQC’s media manager who still works at the watchdog, allegedly supported the decision. All three have denied deleting the report.

Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, has put his faith in the new management team to establish the truth about what happened. However, David Prior, the CQC’s new chairman, and David Behan, the new chief executive, have faced questions about their own transparency.

They were forced to apologise after trying to hide the names of the individuals accused of the cover-up on the basis that publishing them would infringe data protection laws. Mr Prior said he “bitterly regretted” the incident.

The police have also been asked to investigate evidence that the watchdog prevented potentially damning emails from coming to light. Grant Thornton, the management consultancy that reviewed the CQC’s conduct, was denied access to historic emails because officials claimed they were archived for only one year, when in fact they were stored for six.

Mr Behan also defended his disgraced executive team in May and threatened legal action after this newspaper exposed their failings. Earlier this week MPs criticised the watchdog over plans to appoint a £53,000 “strategic marketing and communications lead”. The new employee was expected to “manage CQC’s reputation”, “improve our relations in Westminster” and “ensure CQC’s interests are represented externally in the wake of the scandal.

A spokesman for the CQC said: “The public affairs team supports CQC’s accountability to government, MPs, peers, and up to 150 stakeholder organisations … the size of the public affairs team reflects the level of demand for information from the CQC.”